MiBiz has just published a new magazine entitled, The New Michigan Deal, which focuses on the rise of venture capitalism in this state.
The first issue does stories on numerous stories on venture capitalists across the state, including Rick DeVos’ project known as Start Garden.
Included in the publication is an interview with Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who at one point himself was a venture capitalist, but now oversees the state’s push adopt neoliberal austerity policies that primarily benefit the business community and devastate working class people and the public sector.
The interview with Snyder begins by stating:
These days, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is synonymous with cutting the state’s budget, evaluating Detroit’s need for an emergency manager and shepherding the new right-to-work legislation.
This is an interesting way to begin the article, before they start asking Snyder questions. However, in many ways it is telling. It’s as if, MIBiz editorial staff recognize that the Governor is associated with numerous anti-worker and anti-democratic policies, but what we really want to talk with him about is his enthusiasm for venture capitalism in the state.
MiBiz could have said a great deal more about Snyder’s policy, but since they are writing for the corporate community and the wealthier sectors of society, there is no need to be too forth coming with how the policies of Snyder have impacted working class people and communities.
We wrote back in September, when MLive was taking the position that Snyder did not support a Right to Work policy, what the business press doesn’t want to fully acknowledge:
In addition to Synder having never said he would veto Right to Work legislation, his commitment to anti-union policies and positions has been pretty clear. In fact, one could argue that Snyder has been following the game plan of the West MI Policy Forum and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy ever since he took office nearly two years ago.
Snyder signed onto the elimination of the Michigan Business Tax, implemented the Emergency Financial Manager Law, has tied revenue sharing for municipalities by their ability to downsize their workforce and privatize public services and has supported greater movement to privatize public education by attacking public education.
Snyder, Michigan and Venture Capitalism
The interview with Snyder revealed his enthusiasm for venture capitalism and how far the state has come in terms of the growing numbers of venture capitalists in recent years. Snyder talked about the need to change the “culture” of how business is done. This reference was to him being at a meeting with all suits and saying we needed a change, so he took his tie off.
Listen, changing ones clothing does not signify a change in culture. The same people who are the current venture capitalists might look like hipsters, but they are the same class of elites who come from the dominant class in this society. One indication that this is so, is looking at who else is featured in the issue of The New Michigan Deal. Of the 14 people who were interview or profiled, all 14 of them are White and 13 of the 14 are men. Doesn’t seem to be a change in the culture, at least not the dominant culture, to this writer.
This new publication from MiBiz, while it has a new title, is the same as their other publications in that it celebrates the achievements of the business class, while ignoring the impact on the working class.
The value of reading the publication and particularly the interview with Gov. Snyder, is that it makes clear what this class of people values…….wealth and the ability to make more of it.
Steubenville: This Is Rape Culture’s Abu Ghraib Moment
This article by Laurie Penny is re-posted from ZNet.
It lasted for hours. The pictures circulated online show the unconscious teenage girl hung like a shot steer between two laughing young men, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond, who were convicted this week of driving her from party to party, raping her, assaulting her, and filming themselves doing so. Videos from the night include an extended tape of a friend of the attackers in drunken spasms of joy about just how ‘dead’ the girl looked as she was handed around. “She’s deader than OJ’s wife!” he giggles to himself as his mates film him. It was sadistic young men like this with whom the mainstream media expressed immediate sympathy following the guilty verdict.
Here, there was no question that Mays and Richmond are guilty: there is enough film, photographic and text message evidence to make the case clear. The arguments in their defence, instead, revolve around the notion that these boys, beloved athletes in a town where football is everything, did nothing wrong when they assaulted their helpless victim. They are tragic heroes who were just having fun, like young men do, and the pictures prove it. Everyone looks so happy. High-profile rape cases have happened in American football towns many times before – remember the cheerleader who was forced to cheer for her rapist? – but Steubenville is different. The pictures make it different. What the Steubenville footage recalls most chillingly is the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib prison almost a decade earlier, showing American soldiers in Iraq smiling chummily around the prone bodies of political prisoners.
Steubenville is rape culture’s Abu Ghraib moment. It’s the moment when America and the world are being forced, despite ourselves, to confront the real human horror of the rapes and sexual assaults that take place in their thousands every day in our communities.
Susan Sontag observed of the Abu Ghraib atrocities that “the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken – with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880’s and 1930’s, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.”
The pictures from Steubenville don’t just show a girl being raped. They show that rape being condoned, encouraged, celebrated. What type of culture could possibly produce such pictures? Only one in which women’s autonomy and right to safety counts for so little that these rapists, and those who held the cameras, felt themselves ‘perfectly justified’. Only one in which rape and sexual humiliation of women and girls is so normalised that it does not register as a crime in the minds of the assailants. Only one in which victims are powerless, silenced, dismissed. It is impossible to imagine that in such a culture, assault and humiliation of this kind would not be routine – and indeed, the most conservative estimates suggest that ninety thousand women and ten thousand men are raped in the United States alone every year. That’s what makes the Steubenville case so very uncomfortable – and so important.
Here we have incontrovertible evidence of happy young people not only hurting and humiliating others, but taking pleasure in it, posing with their victims. The Abu Ghraib torture pictures were trophies. The Steubenville rape photos are trophies. They’re mementoes of what must have felt, at the time, like everyone was having the sort of fun they’d want to remember, the sort of fun they’d want to prove to themselves and others later. The Steubenville rapists had fun, and they broadcast that fun to the world. They were confident that nothing could touch them, so baffled by the idea of punishment that they wept like children in court.
Pictures don’t just record reality. They change it. They change us as we take them and consume them. It matters not just that we have photographic evidence of a girl being raped, but that someone took pictures of the assault happening to send to their friends as memories of a jolly night gone a bit hairy. The Ohio teenager who is now receiving death threats for reporting her rape is far from the only young woman to have her assault recorded for posterity. In the past five years, rapes and sexual assaults involving one or more attacker or involved bystander stepping back to pull out a smartphone have proliferated. What makes these men so sure of their inviolable right to stick their fingers and cocks into any part of any female they can hold down that they actually make and distribute images of each other doing so? Rape culture. That’s what rape culture is. The cultural acceptance of rape.
The Steubenville rapists claim that, when they drove a passed-out girl from party to party, slinging her into and out-of cars like a deflated sex-dolly and sticking their fingers inside her, they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong. That’s plausible, although it’s no defence. It’s a plausible if, and only if, you have internalised the assumption that women are not real human beings, just bodies to be manipulated with or without consent, pieces of wet and willing meat there for you to use for your pleasure. There’s a word for what happens when one group of people sees another as less than human and insists on its right to hurt and humiliate them for fun. It’s an everyday word that is often misused to refer to something outside of ourselves. The word is ‘evil’.
This particular evil has been rotting at the fractious heart of Western culture for so long that it barely registers as abnormal, and the initial emotion when it is challenged is rage. Rage that anyone dare question the notion that men’s ‘bright futures’ matter more than women’s right not to be attacked and degraded. It’s an evil that believes that men work and play sports and make an impact on the world and women are there to get fucked. America has been raised on that belief, and like any dogma it can turn ugly when challenged. Jane Doe, whose real name was revealed on Fox news yesterday, has been receiving death threats, and so have her family. After the verdict was handed down, the internet lit up with ugly messages of slut-shaming and solidarity with her attackers: “Remember, kids, if you’re drunk/slutty at a party and embarrassed later, just say you got raped!” wrote @jimmyontheradio. Another, @zJosiah, said: “I feel bad for the two young guys, Mays and Richmond, they did what most people in their situation would have done.”
Yes, it is possible to feel a sick spasm of pity for these young men whose tears in the courtroom were described at such melodramatic length by major news outlets. It is possible to feel pity for those who do violent acts, who hurt and shame others simply because they know nobody’s going to stop them and it seems like fun. Young people can get carried away in times of war, and here I include what we must surely think of in these circumstances as a gender war, especially when they’re on the winning team – and these boys were used to winning. Young people get carried away. But not always. And that ‘not always’ is where pity stops like bile in the throat.
In every situation where atrocity is normalised, in every death-camp and gulag and apartheid city, there are those who refuse to participate. The soldier who ignores the kill order. The prison guard who walks away. The families who risk their safety to shelter refugees. The men and boys who see rape and violence occurring and have the courage to say ‘stop’.
We have sympathy for those who lack that sort of courage only because we worry, even the best of us worry, that there might be circumstances in which we, too, would overlook evil. That’s the question facing every man and not a few women in America right now as the enormity of rape culture begins to dawn. It’s a question of cowardice, and of character. Something is going on – the casual rape and abuse and dehumanisation of women and girls, and some men – that’s so monstrous that to take its magnitude seriously would implicate a great many of us. The question is whether we have the courage to face it – this time.
Those attacking the Steubenville Jane Doe online, defending her rapists, lamenting the destruction of their ‘bright futures’, are cowards. They are cowards who are afraid of what will happen if systematic injustice is acknowledged, and human history is crawling with their kind. Right now that cowardice is being weaponised and used against women and girls, used to shame us into silence, to stop us from speaking out about rape culture as we have just begun to do in an organised fashion. So many of us wonder whether we would be brave enough to stand up in the face of evil. Whether we would allow it to continue or join in the rage. Well, this is the moment. This is our test. Anyone can be outspoken about Steubenville after the fact. The question is: who will stand up before the next Jane Doe is attacked, without expectation of thanks or acclaim, at risk of derision and ostracism or worse, and speak out about all the other Steubenvilles that are still taking place, and will continue to until enough people say ‘stop’?
So many of us wonder whether we would be brave enough to stand up in the face of evil. Whether we would allow it to continue. Well, this is the moment. This is our test. Before the next Jane Doe gets hurt, before more young rapists can tearfully claim ‘they didn’t know’, it’s on us all – men and boys and everyone who loves them – to stand and be counted.
Keystone XL Pipeline and the claim of Good Jobs
This article by Brentin Mock and Erin Zipper is re-posted from ColorLines.
If you’ve been following the controversy over the Keystone XL oil pipeline, recent events will either encourage you, disappoint you, or both.
For a market that’s yet to be determined, this much ballyhooed project would transport hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil daily from Canadian tar sands compounds to the U.S. Gulf Coast for refining. What we do know is that the pipeline would dramatically increase the volume of climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions, erasing what little progress North America has made in reducing its carbon footprint.
The State Department—which has final say in whether Keystone XL gets built—recently admitted as much in a highly publicized (and heavily criticized) preliminary draft of its environmental impact study. State acknowledged the climate-change risks but then argued that rejecting the project wouldn’t reduce the amount of emissions flowing into our atmosphere because Canada would still burn the tar sands and pipeline the oil elsewhere.
Since the State Department report dropped, Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress have been pressuring the Obama administration to approve the controversial pipeline, which is four years in the making. Similarly, AFL-CIO, one of the nation’s largest labor unions, all but endorsed the contentious project citing the jobs it would create. A recent budget proposal from Paul Ryan also trumpeted a high level of job creation. (President Obama recently said the jobs numbers have been exaggerated.)
Despite the growing drumbeat of support from oil-connected D.C., Indigenous and First Nation activists from the “Idle No More” movement continue to resist Keystone XL construction. They say the pipeline will destroy ecosystems vital to their treaty rights. Citing environmental justice concerns, Latino and African American activists in Texas have also joined Idle No More in their opposition to the project.
Now, in what may be the final days before the State Department makes an official decision, keep the following labor and environmental justice stats in mind.
Documentary about the role of women in the 1937 Flint GM Sit-Down Strike to be screened in Grand Rapids
The film that the group Left Forum is screening this month is With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade.
This film tells the story of women’s role in the victory of the United Auto Workers (UAW) sit-down strike From December 1936 to February 1937. The men occupied inside the General Motors Fisher Body 1 and 2 plants in Flint, Michigan. The women braved police and National Guard troops, forcing big auto to back down. Intercuts footage from 1937 with interviews with the same women 40 years later, still active and demanding the UAW acknowledge women as equals.
Left Forum Movie Night
Thursday, March 28, 2013
7:00 PM, movie starts at 7:15 PM
IGE Office 1118 Wealthy Street, SE Grand Rapids (next to Wealthy Street Theater)
Movie is free and shown on a TV
Unprecedented aggressive lobbying campaign by Canada to push Obama to say yes to XL pipeline
This video with author/activist Yves Engler is re-posted from The Real News Network. Editor’s Note: Yves Engler was in Grand Rapids in May of 2011, while on a speaking tour for his book Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the road to economic, social and ecological decay.
GRIID had the opportunity to interview Yves Engler while on that book tour, an interview you can watch online. His most recent book is The Ugly Canadian, which is an expose of the Canada’s foreign policy.
Foundation Profile: Secchia Family Foundation
This foundation profile is part of a series of profiles on local foundations and is part of our Grand Rapids Non-Profit Industrial Complex Project.
The Secchia Family Foundation is the foundation of Peter Secchia and his wife. Seechia is part of the West Michigan power elite, a major playing in the Republican Party, who is involved in numerous groups such as the West Michigan Policy Forum, which has been a champion of the anti-worker austerity measures implemented by Governor Snyder.
Most of the money that the Secchia Family Foundation has contributed during the years of 2009 – 2011 has been to Michigan organizations. Some of the larger recipients are the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, Michigan State University, the Van Andel Institute and Grand Valley State University.
The list of larger recipients is no surprise, since Secchia is an alumni of MSU, has a close relationship to the DeVos family and he and his wife site on the Board of Directors of the Van Andel Instiute.
Some other recipients of Secchia Family Foundation money that clearly fit into the political philosophy of the former Ambassador to Italy during the Reagan administration are: The Mackinac Center for Public Policy ($18,500) and the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce Foundation ($10,000). Both of these entities promote business interests above all else and actively work to weaken government regulations and worker rights.
However, there are some recipients of Secchia Foundation money that might raise some eyebrows. The Secchia Family Foundation has contributed some money to the Grand Rapids Chapter of the NAACP and the Grand Rapids Urban League, both less than one thousands dollars between 2009 – 2011.
Other surprising recipients have been Senior Neighbors ($2,500), Friend of Grand Rapids Parks ($7,000), Kids Food Basket ($2,000), Baxter Community Center ($2,000) and Steepletown Neighborhood Services ($1,000).
I say surprising, since the organizations listed do focus on some social justice work and environmental sustainability, although in a limited fashion. It does raise questions about the motives of the Secchia Family Foundation to donate money to organizations that are dealing with the fallout of economic policies that Secchia has endorsed and financed in electoral politics and through his participation in groups like the Chamber of Commerce, West Michigan Policy Forum and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Such funding also raises questions about how this money impacts the recipients of the Secchia Family Foundation and their willingness to challenge public policy and private power in West Michigan. These are questions we hope to answer in the next phase of this project, which will involve interviewing representatives from the various Non-Profit organizations in the area.
Obama Comes to Bless Israel’s Government of Settlers
This article by Jonathan Cook is re-posted from Dissident Voice.
Those who hoped that Barack Obama would be arriving in Israel to bang Israeli and Palestinian heads together, after four years of impasse in the peace process, will be sorely disappointed.
The US president’s trip beginning today may be historic – the first of his presidency to Israel and the Palestinian territories – but he has been doing everything possible beforehand to lower expectations.
At the weekend, Arab-American leaders revealed that Obama had made it clear he would not present a peace plan, because Israel has indicated it is not interested in an agreement with the Palestinians.
Any lingering doubts about Israel’s intentions were removed by the announcement of a new cabinet, hurriedly sworn in before the president’s visit. This government makes Benjamin Netanyahu’s last one, itself widely considered the most hardline in Israel’s history, look almost moderate.
Ynet, Israel’s popular news website, reported that settler leaders hailed this as their “wet dream” cabinet.
Zahava Gal-On, leader of the opposition Meretz party, concurred, observing that it would “do a lot for the settlers and not much at all for the rest of Israeli society”.
The settlers’ dedicated party, Jewish Home, has been awarded three key ministries – trade and industry, Jerusalem, and housing – as well as control of the parliamentary finance committee, that will ensure that the settlements flourish during this government’s term.
There is no chance Jewish Home will agree to a settlement freeze similar to the one Obama insisted on in his first term. Rather, the party will accelerate both house-building and industrial development over the Green Line, to make the settlements even more attractive places to live.
Uzi Landau, of Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right Yisraeli Beiteinu party, has the tourism portfolio and can be relied on to direct funds to the West Bank’s many Biblical sites, to encourage Israelis and tourists to visit.
The new defence minister, who oversees the occupation and is the only official in a practical position to obstruct this settler free-for-all, is Likud’s Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief of staff known for his ardent support of the settlements.
True, Yair Lapid’s large centrist party Yesh Atid is represented too. But its influence on diplomacy will be muted, because its five ministers will handle chiefly domestic issues such as welfare, health and science.
The one exception, Shai Piron, the new education minister, is a settler rabbi who can be expected to expand the existing programme of school trips to the settlements, continuing the settlers’ successful efforts to integrate themselves into the mainstream.
Far from preparing to make concessions to the US president, Netanyahu has all but declared his backing for Jewish Home’s plan to annex large parts of the West Bank.
The only minister with any professed interest in diplomatic talks, and that mostly driven by her self-serving efforts to stay popular with the White House, is Tzipi Livni. She is well aware that opportunities for negotiations are extremely limited: the peace process received just one perfunctory mention in the coalition agreement.
Obama, apparently only too aware he is facing an Israeli government even more intransigent than the last one, has chosen to avoid addressing the Knesset. Instead he will direct his speech to a more receptive audience of Israeli students, in what US officials have termed a “charm offensive”.
We can expect grand words, a few meagre promises and total inaction on the occupation.
In a sign of quite how loath the White House is to tackle the settlements issue again, its representatives at the United Nations refused on Monday to take part in a Human Rights Council debate that described the settlements as a form of “creeping annexation” of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Obama’s hands-off approach will satisfy his constituency at home. A poll for ABC-TV showed this week that most Americans support Israel over the Palestinians – 55 per cent to 9 per cent. An even larger majority, 70 per cent, think the US should leave the two sides to settle their future for themselves.
Ordinary Israelis, the US president’s target audience, are none too keen on his getting involved either. Recent survey data show that 53 per cent think Obama will fail to protect Israel’s interests, and 80 per cent believe he will not bring progress with the Palestinians over the next four years. The mood is one of indifference rather than anticipation.
These are all good reasons why neither Obama nor Netanyahu will be much focused on the Palestinian issue over the three-day visit. As analyst Daniel Levy observed: “Obama is coming first and foremost to make a statement about the US-Israel bond, not the illegal occupation.”
That is also how it looks to most Palestinians, who have grown increasingly exasperated by US obstructionism. US officials who went to Bethlehem in preparation for Obama’s visit on Friday found themselves caught up in anti-Obama demonstrations. More are expected today in Ramallah.
Other Palestinians protested his visit by establishing today a new tent community on occupied Palestinian land next to Jerusalem. Several previous such encampments have been hastily demolished by Israeli soldiers.
The organisers hope to highlight US hypocrisy in backing Israel’s occupation: Jewish settlers are allowed to build with official state backing on Palestinian land in violation of international law, while Palestinians are barred from developing their own territory in what is now considered by most of the world as the Palestinian state.
The unspoken message of Obama’s visit is that the Netanyahu government is free to pursue its hardline agenda with little danger of anything more than symbolic protest from Washington.
The new Israeli cabinet lost no time setting out its legislative priorities. The first bill announced is a “basic law” to change the state’s official definition, so that its “Jewish” aspects trump the “democratic” elements, a move the Haaretz newspaper termed “insane”.
Among the main provisions is one to restrict state funding to new Jewish communities only. This points to a cynical solution Netanyahu may adopt to placate the simmering social protest movement in Tel Aviv, which has been demanding above all more affordable housing.
Snyder’s Coup
This article by Mike Whitney is re-posted from Counter Punch.
Far-right Governor Rick Snyder has ignored Michigan voters and installed Washington DC attorney Kevyn Orr as Detroit’s emergency financial manager (EFM), a position that will give Orr sweeping powers to tear up labor contracts, slash pensions, cut public services, and privatize city-owned assets. From March 28–the date when Public Act 436 kicks in –Orr will make the decisions that would normally be decided by elected officials, primarily the mayor and the city council. In other words, Detroit will become the first city in the US to have its democratically-elected government replaced by a financial dictator.
According to Firedog Lake’s Lindsay Beyerstein, Detroit’s emergency manager will have “virtually unlimited power to reorganize every aspect of city business, including dissolving the city entirely. The emergency manager even has the power to terminate collective bargaining agreements.” (Firedog Lake)
The elites who support this blatant evisceration of the democratic process, are confident that Orr will serve the needs of their primary constituents; businessmen, Wall Street speculators and bondholders. Accordingly, Detroit’s red ink will be shunted onto working people via pay cuts, high unemployment, and reduced social services even though they are in no way responsible for Detroit’s $300 million budget deficits. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the NYT:
“Despite Mr. Orr’s legal background, he said he hoped the city would not ultimately need to file for bankruptcy. Municipal bankruptcies are rare, but it was lost on no one that the state had selected an expert in bankruptcy law for Detroit, as opposed to a financial accountant, former city manager or elected official.
Under Michigan law, a city can file for bankruptcy only under certain conditions, including if an emergency manager has attempted other measures and concluded that such a move is needed.” (“Bankruptcy Lawyer Is Named to Manage an Ailing Detroit”, New York Times)
Orr will avoid bankruptcy at all cost, mainly because bankruptcy would mean losses for banks and bondholders which is a big no-no. Instead, he will balance the budget on the backs of teachers, firefighters and other public employees who will either get their pink slips or see their weekly paychecks shrivel to paupers wages. Elites in the Eurozone followed the same basic script when they installed their “technocrats” in Athens and Rome in the early rounds of the EU debt crisis. These faux prime ministers excuted a well-rehearsed looting operation that thrust the continent into severe recession. Orr will follow the same strategy; crushing the unions, reducing elderly pensioners to destitution, and auctioning off valuable city assets at firesale prices, all under the banner of austerity. According to SEP presidential candidate Jerry White:
“Orr is threatening to carry out a “managed bankruptcy” of Detroit to extract unprecedented concessions from city workers. “I am hopeful to engage in fruitful and productive discussions without the need to resort to bankruptcy,” Orr said last Thursday, adding that, “One thing everybody needs to know, if you go into bankruptcy, Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code is weighted toward the municipality.”
In other words, if the unions prove unable to force city workers to accept savage wage and benefit cuts, then the bankruptcy court will impose this and much more on workers, retirees and city residents. “I don’t want to pull that cudgel out unless I have to,” Orr said. “I’d prefer to pursue a consensual resolution…Don’t make me go to bankruptcy court. You won’t enjoy it.” (“The managed bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler: A model for the assault on Detroit”, Jerry White, World Socialist Web Site)
Wall Street and the media have been overwhelmingly supportive of Snyder’s move to suspend democracy in the name of fiscal consolidation. S&P credit analyst Jane Hudson Ridley summed it up like this, “The appointment of an EM allows the city to move forward in a more efficient manner.” Indeed, financial elites don’t really care whether the appearance of democracy is maintained or not. What matters is the continued upward distribution of wealth. To that end, Orr’s task is to make sure that the losses are assigned to those who can least afford the cost, working people.
Snyder’s coup d’etat in Detroit is a test-case for a more ambitious plan to install Wall Street’s proconsuls in struggling cities across the country. If Orr is able achieve his objectives in Motor City, then the same strategy will be applied elsewhere.
10 Years Since the US Invasion/Occupation of Iraq: Part II – Iraq was not a mistake, but part of the Imperial Plan
This is the second article in a series of three centered around the 10th anniversary of the US Invasion/Occupation of Iraq. The first article dealt with media lies and misinformation.
There has been a fair amount of stories on liberal news blogs about the 10th anniversary of the US invasion/occupation of Iraq. In most of these articles, along with numerous memes, the pattern has been to call Iraq the worst crime the US has ever committed and to lay the blame at the feet of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld.
First, lets be clear, US foreign policy is riddled with a whole array of brutality, including torture, murder, occupation and even genocide. There is a long list of evidence to support such crimes, but I will limit that documentation to a few books and declassified US government documents.
There are several books by Noam Chomsky that I would recommend, but perhaps a recent book that deals with US war crimes and US imperialism is Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. Another excellent book is by foreign policy analyst William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II. Along with books likes these I would highly recommend the declassified US government documents collected and analyzed by the National Security Archive, which provides a look at what US policy planners have said about US foreign policy for decades. There is plenty of declassified documentation as it relates to Iraq, even documents on Iraq and WMDs.
Secondly, while the Bush administration did push for the US invasion/occupation of Iraq beginning in 2002, they were only able to complete this goal because of the overwhelming support by the Democratic Party.
Many Democrats also voted for initial legislation in October of 2002 and while many have objected to the misinformation on WMDs, virtually all of them continued to vote for annual funding for the US occupation of Iraq. For example, Michigan Senator Carl Levin, while critical of the Bush plan early on, voted for every funding bill on Iraq after the invasion/occupation began.
The larger issue that we ought to focus on for the 10th anniversary of the US invasion/occupation of Iraq are both the crimes committed and the imperialist nature of the US plan.
Brutalizing Iraq
In order to look at the totality of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation, we need to first provide some historical context. The US supported Iraq with weapons during the Iran – Iraq war between 1980 – 1988. This was took its toll on the Iraqi people and the economy, with thousands of lives lost.
In January of 1991, the US began a bombing campaign against Iraq that devastated much of Iraq’s infrastructure, killed thousands more and was followed by the most severe form of international sanctions ever imposed on a country. The sanctions were so severe that the United Nations estimate that roughly 500,000 Iraqi children died during the sanctions years (Clinton years) from preventable causes. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked whether the death of half a million Iraqi children was worth it, she said, “we think it was worth it.”
Now that we have established that Iraq had been suffering in part from US policy for nearly two decades before the 2003 invasion/occupation, we can more honestly assess the human and monetary cost of this policy.
The US invasion and occupation was devastating to Iraqi civil society in ways that numbers cannot fully reflect. However, statistically, the human cost of the US invasion/occupation has been catastrophic.
Number of Iraqi dead – the numbers vary depending on which sources one looks at, but the number is somewhere between 190,000 (Brown University report) or over 1 million.
Number of Iraqi Wounded – this number has been hard to quantify, since people are still being wounded at high levels, from unexploded bomblets that the US used during the invasion/occupation. Most of the wounded have been children.
Number of Iraqis Displaced – millions of Iraqis were displaced throughout the US invasion/occupation, with some returning once the occupation decreased, but one source puts the number of displaced at this moment to be 2.8 million.
In addition to the human cost of the war, the economic cost has been tremendous. Iraq may never recover from the devastation and has been left in a state of chaos. On the US end, we know that the cost of the war has been astronomical, based on the research by the National Priorities Project (NPI). The NPI puts the current cost at over 812 billion dollars, but the new report from Brown University puts the cost at $2.2 Trillion.
Iraq: Part of the Imperial Plan
Many US politicians refer to Iraq as a “mistake,” which is a constant term that President Obama uses to describe what happened. However, such a term is not only inaccurate, it is dishonest.
The US invasion/occupation of Iraq was not about WMDs, getting rid of Saddam or bringing democracy to that country. The US invasion/occupation of Iraq was about geo-political and economic hegemony in the Middle East.
Besides the human cost of the invasion/occupation, the US plan from very early on was to engage in an economic restructuring of Iraq. Within months of the occupation, the US had plans to restructure the economy of Iraq, by rewriting the country’s constitution, which would allow for more foreign investment and privatization of previously public services. This push to implement a neoliberal economic plan for Iraq is well documented in Naomi Klein’s book, Shock Doctrine. Part of this Shock Doctrine was to have US-owned reconstruction companies get the Pentagon contracts to “re-build” Iraq, even though much of that money was wasted and redirected due to corruption.
However, the largest benefit to restructuring Iraq’s economy was the push to privatize Iraq’s oil reserves, which was successful and open the floodgates for foreign oil companies to take over, as you can see from this map.
Lastly, it is important to note that the US occupation of Iraq is not over. The SOPA agreement worked out by the Bush administration and put into effect under the Obama administration would allow for 20,000 US troops to remain in Iraq, along with the tens of thousands of private mercenary forces that are being employed to protect US interests. The US also maintains numerous military bases in Iraq and is not likely to dismantle those, considering the geo-political importance of Iraq, particularly as the US continues to be antagonistic towards Iraq.
While it is understandable and easier to lay the blame for the US “war” in Iraq at the feet of the Bush administration, it completely ignores the bi-partisan nature of US imperialism and hides the fact that the US occupation and exploitation of Iraq continues.
New Report looks at the Far Right’s “religious liberty” campaign as nothing more than an anti-LGBTQ tactic
This article is re-posted from Political Research Associates. Editor’s Note: The argument that doing certain things would be an infringement on the religious beliefs of people that is dealt with in this article has been seen in the West Michigan area with Autocam CEO John Kennedy (who is Catholic), who has publicly stated he will not comply with the new government healthcare policy because it would violate his personal religious beliefs. The Grand Rapids-based Acton Institute is also profiled in the report from PRA.
Consider the following situation: Because of her religious beliefs against same-sex marriage, a New Mexico photographer refuses to shoot a lesbian couple’s wedding. The photographer claims taking the pictures would infringe on her religious liberty. The couple, on the other hand, faces discrimination based on sexual orientation. Who is in the right?
Given New Mexico’s anti-discrimination law, the couple clearly is. Yet conservative Christian groups often invert the narrative by framing religious people as the true victims of discrimination. A new report by PRA Religious Liberty Fellow Dr. Jay Michaelson, Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights, examines the growth of recent movements against same-sex marriage and reproductive rights on the basis of “religious liberty.”
Being a (conservative) Christian does not permit the photographer to ignore state anti-discrimination laws, much in the same way she cannot ignore environmental and labor laws. She, as an individual, may value her beliefs over the civil rights of others, but her business does not have that luxury. Furthermore, the court found that the simple act of taking photos of a same-sex wedding, as a professional photographer, did not truly “infringe upon freedom of speech or compel unwanted expression.”
The report analyzes this case and others in which the Christian Right has painted itself as the victim of women and LGBTQ individuals asserting their rights. Invariably, in these arguments, “religious freedom” includes the freedom to discriminate.
Michaelson points out that the Right’s religious liberty rhetoric is entrenched in a history of marginalization: “Then as now, the Christian Right turned antidiscrimination arguments on their heads,” he writes. “Instead of African Americans being discriminated against by segregated Christian universities, the universities were being discriminated against by not being allowed to exclude them.”
At least nine state legislatures currently hold “religious liberty caucuses” to redefine what America means by religious liberty and carve out wider and wider arenas that would not be protected under discrimination law. An increasingly popular right-wing cause, religious liberty was even one of Mitt Romney’s rallying points in the 2012 presidential debate.
Freedom of religion is ultimately not under attack in the United States. Federal courts already give wide scope to religions to discriminate when hiring clergy or in their religious practices. Legalizing same-sex marriage in civil law would require not one Christian minister to marry LGBTQ couples. These facts, however, does not stop right-wing lobbyists from suggesting that new laws might do exactly that to stir up fear and outrage.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 